The Golden Pink New Year Celebration was conceived as a Rico Supper Club in Residence dinner and party, hosted by our friends Jan and Kajsa in their home in Copenhagen. Built around their idea of gold and pink as the theme for the evening, the project unfolded as a shared table experience where food, ceramics, objects, and atmosphere came together in one immersive composition.

What began as a color brief quickly became a wider language for the dinner. In the depth of winter, gold and pink felt like more than decoration. Gold carried glow, ritual, abundance, candlelight, warmth, and a touch of glamour; pink brought softness, intimacy, sweetness, play, and pleasure. Together, these colors held exactly the kind of tension I wanted for New Year’s: something festive and theatrical, but still personal, generous, and alive.

This was an invitation not only to dine together, but to enter a table built as a landscape: a place where color moved through food, serving, and space, and where the meal itself became a ritual for crossing from one moment into another.

Concept & Inspiration:

The Golden Pink New Year Celebration was inspired by:

• The idea of New Year’s as a threshold: a collective passage between endings and beginnings, marked through food, light, and gathering.

• Gold and pink as emotional and edible cues: gold for celebration, glow, richness, ritual, and promise; pink for tenderness, sweetness, intimacy, and joy.

• A more fluid sense of time, one that reaches beyond the strictness of the calendar year toward a more instinctive rhythm of seasons, return, and renewal.

• My ceramic practice, and specifically a collection made in Bilbao in spring, later activated in winter as the functional and symbolic core of the table.

The experience was designed to move beyond a dinner party and into a multisensory edible composition, where every element, from the ceramic forms to the menu to the candlelight and social choreography of the evening, contributed to one shared atmosphere.

Themes Explored:

• The Table as Landscape: The table was approached not simply as a place setting, but as a flowing environment where food could travel, accumulate, and connect people through movement and sharing.

• Color as Ingredient: Gold and pink were not treated as styling choices alone, but translated into taste, texture, and mood through saffron, turmeric, beetroot, berries, candlelight, pickles, and fruit.

• Food as Ritual: The dinner became a way of marking passage: not only the turning of a calendar year, but the quieter, older ritual of gathering around light and abundance in the darkest part of the season.

• Objects in Use: The ceramics were not displayed as static pieces, but activated as a modular serving structure, allowing functional objects to shape the choreography of the meal.

• Collaboration & Conviviality: Developed together with Mario and Simona, the dinner became a collective act of making, where individual contributions were held within one coherent table language.

The Setting: A Supper Club in Residence

Hosted in Jan and Kajsa’s home, the dinner transformed a domestic interior into a festive and immersive supper-club environment. Rather than separating dining from scenography, the space allowed the two to merge. Metallic streamers, candlelight, folded napkins, glassware, reflective surfaces, and the guests themselves all became part of the visual rhythm of the evening.

The setting was intimate, but not minimal. It invited abundance. The table was long, glowing, layered, and full of movement: a place where one could admire the composition for a second and then immediately reach for bread, dip into hummus, pass a plate, pour a glass, and continue the conversation. That tension mattered to me: composed, but not stiff; designed, but fully meant to be lived in.

At the center of it all ran the ceramic installation, which gave the table both its formal structure and its conceptual spine.

The Ceramic River: A Modular Serving Landscape

At the heart of the dinner was a ceramic collection I created in Bilbao the previous spring: a set of fifteen interlocking pieces conceived as a puzzle and designed to come together in a river-like formation.

For this dinner, the collection found its purpose as a modular serving landscape placed through the center of the table. Rather than functioning as separate platters, the pieces connected into one continuous form, a current running through the gathering, carrying dips, garnishes, colors, and edible details from one end of the table to the other.

The river became both practical and symbolic. Practically, it offered a new way of serving: more fluid, more collective, more compositional than a series of individual bowls or plates. Symbolically, it suggested time, continuity, passage, and connection. Ceramics made in one spring were activated in winter and revisited again in the next. In that sense, the river held more than food. It linked seasons, gestures, conversations, and the invented order of the calendar with something more organic and cyclical.

I was interested in how these pieces could shape not only presentation, but experience: how ceramics could become a structure for conviviality, directing the eye and the hand, while also carrying a quieter narrative about movement and renewal.

The Menu: A Feast in Gold and Pink

The menu was developed collaboratively with Mario and Simona, and built around the chromatic and emotional logic of gold and pink. We conceptualized the dishes together, divided the preparations between us, and allowed each contribution to strengthen the whole.

The opening of the meal unfolded as a generous edible terrain of small bites, dips, fresh vegetables, pickled elements, and color-driven contrasts. A variety of hummus in different shades of pink and gold became one of the key visual anchors of the table, with beetroot and turmeric doing their coloring magic. Alongside them came eggplant dip, radishes in multiple colors and patterns, beetroot, small peppers, pickled carrots, pickled onion, yellow melon with prosciutto, breadsticks, cheese with pink grapes, shrimp tartlets, turmeric brioche buns, and pink-and-gold deviled eggs.

These dishes created a table of abundance where color moved through fresh, creamy, crisp, briny, sweet, and acidic registers. The food was not arranged as isolated courses alone, but as a shifting landscape of textures and tones that could be reached, shared, and recombined across the evening.

The main course brought the golden palette into a deeper, warmer register: oven-baked salmon, saffron risotto, and honey and lemon pearls. Here, the meal moved from playful grazing into something more centered and ceremonial. The saffron risotto carried warmth and richness, while the salmon and bright pearls kept the dish luminous and alive.

Dessert, created by Simona under her brand Source (raw vegan desserts in Copenhagen), returned the dinner to pink through a red berries and chocolate dessert, finishing the evening with depth, sweetness, and a final indulgent note. The meal closed as it began: within the gold-and-pink spectrum, but now softer, richer, and more reflective.

Collaboration:

This dinner was deeply collaborative and shaped by the people involved.

Jan and Kajsa, as hosts, brought the original spark through the idea of gold and pink, opening the conceptual direction of the evening and making their home the site for its unfolding.

Mario, bread maker extraordinaire, brought warmth, structure, and generosity through his baking and contributions to the menu, including breadsticks, turmeric brioche buns, a large shared bread, and the honey and lemon pearls that finished the main course.

Simona, brought her signature elegance and sensual precision through the dessert: a red berries and chocolate creation that carried the pink register of the table into its final, sweet conclusion.

My role was to lead the overall food-design concept, table composition, ceramic centerpiece, and key dishes within the menu, weaving the visual, material, and edible elements into one coherent experience.

What mattered most was that the collaboration never felt segmented. The dinner held together because each contribution was distinct, but all of them spoke the same language.

Food Design Approach:

For me, this project was about allowing food design to remain both conceptual and generous.

I did not want the table to feel overly styled or untouchable. I wanted it to feel animated, like something between a feast, an installation, and a social ritual. The colors were symbolic, yes, but they also had to taste like something. Gold had to live through saffron, turmeric, honey, bread, candlelight, and warmth. Pink had to live through beetroot, pickles, berries, grapes, roe, softness, and acidity. The concept had to move through the body as much as through the eye.

This is where the project became meaningful to me: in the point where color became ingredient, where ceramics became serving choreography, and where the table could hold aesthetic intention without losing appetite, humor, pleasure, or ease.

Outcome & Reflection:

This was not just a New Year’s dinner. It was a shared composition built around passage, seasonality, color, and care.

What stayed with me most was the way the ceramic river held the entire evening together: visually, functionally, and symbolically. It turned the center of the table into a line of connection, allowing food to travel and gather, while quietly suggesting another way of thinking about time: not only as fixed dates and clean beginnings, but as something softer, more circular, more seasonal.

In that sense, the dinner now feels connected as much to spring as to New Year’s Eve. If January marks one version of beginning, spring offers another: one measured by returning light, by softened edges, by instinct rather than pressure. The project came to sit beautifully inside that tension: created in winter, rooted in a promise of warmth, and carrying within it the rhythm of seasons rather than the certainty of a single date.

The Golden Pink New Year Celebration became, in the end, a way of gathering around those ideas through food: abundance without stiffness, beauty without distance, and design that remained fully meant to be eaten.

Credits:

Hosted by: Jan Roll and Kajsa Nylander
Developed with: Mario and Simona
Creative direction, food design, table composition, and ceramic centerpiece: Andreea Vlad
Dessert: Simona Stanciu / Source
Bread and selected menu contributions: Mario Amaros